John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Are we moving from Passive Patients to Active Consumers? What impact will that change have? #craneware14#HITsm#hcsm

These were the questions I was asking myself when I sat in on a presentation by Intermountain’s revenue cycle manager at the Craneware Summit in Las Vegas. I think the clear answer to the first question is that patients are becoming more active. Patients are shouldering a larger portion of the cost of their healthcare and so now they’re move involved in the care they receive. Plus, the internet and mobile applications have made it much easier for a patient to be informed on their health.

The later question is much harder. What impact will this change have on healthcare?

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but it’s going to take a dramatic shift by the current healthcare system to adapt to this changing consumer. The days of the omniscient doctor (at least perceived) are gone and there’s now a shift to a more collaborative care model.

Of course, many doctors fear that this shift is going too far. They usually point to the overbearing patient who thinks they know better than the doctor. Certainly these patients exist, but they are the minority and aren’t a huge shift from the patients who didn’t listen to their doctor before the shift happened. The problem is that 1 rotten apple spoils the bunch.

Overall, I think this change will be a good thing for the healthcare system. There are a lot of things you can’t change in healthcare if you don’t have an active patient that’s engaged and cares about their health. Hopefully this will be the start of that movement to helping patients care more about their health.

If you want proof that things are changing, Intermountain has changed their mission statement. First, it’s not very often that an organization as large as Intermountain makes a major change to their mission statement. Second, think about whether this mission statement would work for your hospital or healthcare organization:

One response to "Are We Moving from Passive Patients to Active Consumers?"

According to the Meaningful use Stage 2 measures CMS has required the physicians to give 50% of their patients access to patient portals. Making it a core objective so now patients are required to become active and be engaged with physicians and other entities through patient portals.